Onboarding NYC: 1981
A New Introduction To An Old Story
Returning from work on a humid July evening in 1981, my first season in New York City, I wandered through the palpitating heart of Greenwich Village and paused on Carmine Street. I was in no hurry to return home to my humble-ain’t-the-word abode. After browsing esoteric disco records at Vinyl Mania, I pondered a budget supper at Joe’s Pizza. Suddenly, a loud and suspiciously familiar voice pounded my eardrums.
“Mark Coleman! Hey Mark!” “Mark! Hurry Up! C’mon, Mark! Get In!”
It sounded like my neighbor Frank Davol. But I couldn’t locate him until I turned to look at the stretch limo idling on this narrow side-street, directly in front of me. Frank’s statuesque head and shoulders popped out of the open sunroof. He was clearly jacked up, on sheer enthusiasm or possibly something stronger. My dinner would have to wait. Once I tumbled into the Lincoln and we wheeled north onto Sixth Avenue, Frank stood and yanked me through the sunroof. I felt silly, and exhilarated, as we headed uptown, both of us hooting and hollering like fools. The only thing missing was the ticker tape.
It was far from the first display of my neighbor’s extravagant whims I’d witnessed. Still a rented limousine was inexplicably extra, even for Frank. Despite obvious clues, I hadn’t yet determined the source of his mysterious “mad money.” As far as I could tell, Frank appeared to get around in high style — especially for a guy living in a dump.
*
People who didn’t live in New York perceived the city as a fantastically dangerous place in the Seventies and Eighties. Many Americans assumed Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs constituted a wide-open bazaar for muggers, junkies, gangsters, conmen, pimps, whores and hustlers.
But another collective belief — or conceit — about New York persisted throughout the city’s decline and eventual rebirth. Perhaps it still exists in the 21st Century, albeit for a privileged few. (Then again, in the wake of Covid perhaps New York City itself is once again up for grabs.) Anyway this popular myth about New York lured hundreds if not thousands of young people to the city during the waning years of the last century. It was the promise (if not the actual existence) of endless possibilities. There were rumors of buried treasure hidden beneath the city’s bad reputation during the Seventies and Eighties. Young prospectors arrived and unearthed a new identity for themselves in myriad ways. You could assemble a fresh art form from the detritus; make music out of the noise in the street. You could also make a shit-ton of money in all kinds of arcane ways. (You could, I’m still working on that one.) And if you’re lucky like I was, and still am, the greatest inspirations you’ll ever find are the people you meet here.
*
My love affair with an idealized vision of The City began sometime in 1970. My friend Richard and I rode the bus from our sleepy suburb to downtown Cincinnati on a Saturday afternoon. In the chili parlor off Fountain Square, all the other kids were right in our age range, 12–14, and though most of them were black it didn’t matter here, we were all spinning on our stools and eating “coney islands” and bobbing along to the Five Stairsteps’ “Ooh Child” (a heartfelt Jackson 5 knockoff) on the radio. That moment in the chili parlor took root in my consciousness. Soul music and social diversity became forever associated with The City in my searching pre-teen mind.
Ten years later, I visited New York City for the first time and experienced another urban epiphany. For five days and nights on that college spring break vacation, everywhere we went, Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” emanated from storefronts, passing cars and the portable stereos known as ghetto blasters or boomboxes. I attended some great live music shows during that trip, including Parliament/Funkadelic at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, maybe the best concert I’ve ever seen. But the sound that echoed in my head back in the Midwest was the funky music in the street.
One year later I was back. My first six months in New York were difficult. City life overloaded my senses on a daily basis. Yet at the same time I felt isolated amid the millions and millions of people. Outside of work, I spent much of my time alone, reading or listening to the radio. I couldn’t afford a stereo or television. I lived in a seedy rooming house in Greenwich Village, what was known as an SRO (Single Room Occupancy). One room with no kitchen and bathroom down the hall: I cooked on a hot plate. My neighbors included an opera student who practiced all day in her room, a middle-aged hotel bellhop, the requisite junkie thief and another guy my age who turned out to be a high-end male prostitute. I spent as little time “at home” as I possibly could.
However I did make one fast friend during this solitary period. He proved to be a frequent companion, off and on, for the next few years. There was a catch, however, a complication that meant our platonic relationship would always be unrequited. My first friend in New York was a voice on the radio. But what a voice! And what taste in music!
If Frankie Crocker isn’t on your radio, your radio really isn’t on…
During the long hot summer of 1981 I hung out in nearby Washington Square Park. The big portable radios resounded throughout the square, from the grand arch to the disused fountain, dozens of boomboxes tuned to the same station. So from all corners of the park, I could hear the baritone announcer reading the resonant ID and promo.
W…B…L…S…Number One….Where you hear THIS: five seconds of “Square Biz” by Teena Marie…
AND THIS: “Magnificent Dance” by The Clash…
AND THIS: “I’m In Love” by Evelyn Champagne King…
AND THIS: “I’ll Do Anything For You” by Denroy Morgan…
AND THIS: “Heartbeat” by Taana Gardner…
AND THIS: “Never Too Much” by Luther Vandross…
It’s all happening NOW on WBLS-FM New York
Sometimes, the music in the street commented on my new life like a boombox Greek chorus (“Can You Handle It” by Sharon Redd). I could never quite decide whether it was tragedy or comedy.
The weekend afternoons I spent in the park were my first and only taste of street life. I’d watch people getting cheated at chess, or buying beat reefer from the sketchy vendors who thronged like piranhas near the southwest entrance. In the square itself, student clowns and apprentice acrobats performed stunts with crazed abandon. There was a fire-eating daredevil whose act I watched between my fingers, sensing every performance would end in disfigurement or death. His homemade torches resembled Molotov cocktails. This guy looked like he ran away from the circus.
The fountain basin served as an open-air theatre for itinerant musicians and comedians. People sat in rows on the concrete steps as if they were perched in the ballpark bleachers. The typical bill of fare on a Saturday might include a ragtag bebop ensemble, a troupe of incredibly nimble street-dancers accompanied by drummers pounding plastic buckets, and last but not least, a succession of self-styled funnymen. The unfortunate religious fanatics who strayed into this arena never fared too well.
By far the most popular performer in the park, the star of the circuit, was a wild-eyed guy named Charlie Barnett. He’d come running through the park, banging on a hubcap or blowing a whistle in between in shouts of “Showtime! Showtime!” His high-energy delivery and raunchy riffs weren’t merely derived from Richard Pryor’s, in many cases they were Pryor’s, almost verbatim. His entire act was a cover version; Charlie Barnett was a Richard Pryor tribute band. He was also funny, in small doses.
I rarely ran into any of my neighbors in the park, which was initially part of its appeal.
Eventually I became friends, more or less, with two people in the building. Frank Davol and Jeff Reidel both lived on the first floor, in two-room suites, while everybody else made due with a single. Frank and Jeff provided my crucial primer in the promise and perils of radical self-invention.
*
My point of departure for New York City was less than romantic: a forlorn platform in the freight yards outside the grand old Union Terminal. One of Cincinnati’s architectural treasures, with murals by German artist Winold Reiss, Union Terminal was functioning — minimally — as an upscale shopping mall at the onset of the Eighties. Only a few stores huddled beneath the sprawling paintings, and customers were scarce, or at least they had been on my aimless exploratory visit during the holidays.
The Amtrak Cardinal paused in Cincinnati on its way from Chicago to Washington D.C. I said goodbye to my parents, who were (as always) totally supportive of my big move yet visibly apprehensive on this, the big day. It was late afternoon on a frigid Tuesday in early February 1981.
Rural West Virginia passed by my window most of the night. I couldn’t have slept even if my seat had been comfortable. So I restlessly gazed at an endless sea of pitch-black nothing, occasionally interrupted by random islands of illumination: the pointless blinking of a traffic signal over a deserted intersection, a beacon spot-light shining forth from the side of a windowless corrugated shed.
Arriving at Washington’s Union Station in the early daylight is a jumbled blur in my memory. Somehow I managed to jog between trains and climb aboard the northbound Metroliner. The window view looked decidedly different from the night before: disused factories, decayed warehouses. A sign hung on a huge smokestack in Wilmington, Delaware: Documents Shredded. The gory details of Watergate, Nixon’s secret tapes and hastily scrapped transcripts, were still fresh memories at that point in time. So the mention of pulverized documents (years before home shredders!) rendered this commercial service both wildly funny and slightly ominous. I was entering that part of the country — the East Coast — where information mattered. Words and ideas were taken seriously here. Or so I presumed.
Pulling out of Philadelphia, the urban landscape could’ve been a vision plucked from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. (Along with many Seventies teenagers, I went through a devoted Vonnegut phase in high school. Star Trek reruns too. ) In early 1981, North Philadelphia resembled a bomb site: crumbling row houses, junked autos, cracked concrete walls further pockmarked with cartoon-letter graffiti, bumper crops of broken bottles harvested in vacant lots.
The concluding hour or so of the journey consisted of a leisurely crawl through a tunnel deep below New Jersey. Intermittent delays lent a starkly claustrophobic air to the already uncomfortable (cold, crowded) train car.
Talk about being fresh off the boat, wet behind the ears: I got played for a sucker not half a dozen steps into Penn Station. The qualifying exam in urban savvy is easy to flunk.
“Hey my man you need a cab?”
I sure did. However, this helpful stranger — a thirty-ish guy with a big mustache and what I interpreted as a jaunty taxi driver’s cap — grabbed my battered Samsonite just as I nodded in the affirmative, lugging my other suitcase and briefcase. I followed him toward a distant exit sign. A minute later the truth sunk into the pit of my stomach. This dude was no cab driver. His “help” would consist entirely of steering the unwitting customer — me — toward the clearly marked taxi stand where other potential passengers waited in an orderly line while the legit drivers sat behind the steering wheels of their Yellow Cabs. My man demanded $10 and finally accepted $5, while I silently thanked him for a quick education in the potential hazards of public transportation and by extension, the city itself. Apparently, people looking to take advantage waited around every corner.
*
Landing an entry-level editorial spot at the august and obscure (to me) trade journal Railway Age, in a thunder clap of luck, just ten days after my arrival in New York, was only half the battle. The timer was ticking on my temporary lodging. After a harrowing and near-disastrous excursion to the Lower East Side, the final apartment ad I answered sounded too good to be true: a studio (one-room) apartment near Washington Square Park, the center of Greenwich Village, for $300 per month. Fiscally, the rent was a stretch. But I replied in a last-ditch effort, leaving my name and temporary number on a robotic answering machine, never expecting to hear back.
The address turned out to be the best thing about 78 Washington Place: smack dab in the middle of a picturesque block between the park and the commercial strip of lower Sixth Avenue. Arriving early, I conducted a quick surveillance mission before my appointment. The block contained a new NYU Law School dorm and some older three and four-story structures. Several featured cozy-looking Italian restaurants on the ground floor. One building in particular drew my attention because it appeared out of place next to the other neatly rehabilitated town houses. The dirty-red brick recalled the color of dried blood. Makeshift rag-curtains adorned most of the windows facing the street. This had to be it. I knew.
I stepped over a decorative iron fence and ascended the crumbling concrete steps to the front door. After several attempts, the buzzer didn’t summon anyone so I began to knock. Instinctively, I stepped back just as the door creaked open and I finally received an answer.
“Ah are you the guy looking for an apartment?”
Jeff the Super, as he’d identified himself on the phone, was a gangly middle-aged man, well over six feet despite stooping a bit. He wore a jailhouse pallor, as if he never got out in the sun. His lank black hair was streaked with grey, his incongruous green eyes magnified by gigantic bug-eyed glasses: ocular relics of the previous decade that had survived time’s ravages thanks to a tactical deployment of rubber bands. He immediately qualified as the strangest person I’d met in New York so far. Yet somehow his oddball manner wasn’t off-putting; to the contrary Jeff was cheerful, friendly, projecting a loony infectious optimism right from the start.
Entering the front hallway we were met by the musty, stifling aroma of a long-neglected attic. Sloppily applied globs of bilious red paint didn’t hide the cracks in the walls. Bare light bulbs in half-broken fixtures provided what passed for illumination.The place gave me the willies. As I caught up with Jeff on the creaky staircase’s first landing, a squat, sour-faced man in what could have been a fancy headwaiter’s or bellhop’s uniform appeared from above, grunting something cryptic about toilet paper as he pushed past us.
“There are a couple things that Anita — she’s the landlord — forgot to put in the ad,” Jeff said as we resumed our ascent to the third floor. “The bathroom is in the hall and there’s no kitchen.”
At least he didn’t say a couple little things.
“But every room has a sink, and a hotplate.”
To cut a long story short I moved in two days later, and stayed for six months.
*
